Why do you like Skinner's developmental psychology theory?
Like Skinner, Skinner is a world-famous ideologist and historian. In 1960s, Skinner became famous in western academic circles with an important paper "Meaning and Understanding" in the History of Thought (hereinafter referred to as "History of Thought"). In this article with a strong smell of gunpowder, Skinner summed up all kinds of common fallacies when scholars interpret classic works. In his view, their guilt mainly lies in making the classic text break away from its original context, so the final interpretation is the myth of thought and theory, not the real history. There is no doubt that the influence of the history of thought is shocking, if not revolutionary. Skinner's work after The History of Ideas is almost all about defending and implementing the methodology he proposed at the beginning, and his speech and discussion in China this time can also be regarded as part of it. If the theories of Skinner and Cambridge School are summarized by contextualism, the starting point of contextualism, in Skinner's view, is to distinguish the text as speech from the text as action. Skinner believes that reinforcement is the basis of shaping behavior. The child accidentally made an action strengthened by the educator, and the probability of this action appearing later will be greater than that of the action without strengthening. With the increase of strengthening times or intensity, the probability also increases, which leads to the establishment of human operation behavior. If an action is not reinforced in time after it happens, the effect of reinforcement is not obvious, or even ineffective. If the child's behavior is not strengthened in the process of behavior development, the behavior will fade. Therefore, children's bad behaviors, such as unreasonable troubles and crying for a long time, cannot be strengthened when these behaviors occur, so that they gradually disappear. We should strengthen and consolidate children's good behavior.